‘A unique space’: Sports Volunteering in the Greater Manchester City Region

Elliott, Catherine Susan (2025) ‘A unique space’: Sports Volunteering in the Greater Manchester City Region. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Volunteers are a vital resource in the organisation and delivery of sport and physical activity in event, club and informal settings (Cuskelly, Hoye and Auld, 2006). The sports sector has faced increasing challenges in recent years from increased modernisation, formalisation of the volunteer management processes, pressure to work with wider groups of stakeholders across multiple sectors and technology, moving at a pace which is hard for the sector to keep up with. Understanding the ways volunteers are managed, that is, recruited, retained and rewarded amidst national policy shifts during a period of high exogenous pressures remains, a multifaceted challenge. As such this research undertakes an empirical interpretive examination of sports volunteering in the devolved Greater Manchester (GM) City Region focused on collaborative governance and delivery. Moving forward contemporary scholarship in this area, this thesis helps further our understanding by providing insight into how the complexities of collaborative delivery principles (Ansell and Gash, 2008) and developments in policy and regional governance have influenced sports volunteer management in a rapidly changing environment. Significantly, adopting an interpretivist approach to interrogate a single-embedded case study of the GM City Region, a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with volunteers, volunteer and strategic leads from across the region revealed important insight into the unique space of sports volunteering in the GM City Region. Findings show there is a complex landscape of sports volunteer management with tensions regarding volunteer identity and the fragmentation allowing for local autonomy but leading to confusion. These are set within a collaborative governance delivery model, highlighting the complexity of actors operating within external pressures on the sports volunteering landscape. The research then revisits existing collaborative governance models and theory in light of the empirical findings from sports volunteer stakeholders in the GM City Region.